Tony voters do not have it easy. As the quality of (some) shows on Broadway improves, so does the difficulty and futility of ranking them. Yet not fully futile, at least for me in my fictional Tonys: A long look back at the 2024-25 season, during which I saw all 42 eligible Broadway productions, offered a chance to recall, reorganize and enjoy in memory the work of thousands of very talented artists.
Thus, below, my take on the likely winners (marked with a ✓) and my personal “shouldas” (marked with a ★) in 17 of the 26 competitive categories. I hope your own Tonys, no doubt different from mine, prove as rewarding.
Best Play
“English”
“The Hills of California”
“John Proctor Is the Villain”
✓ ★ “Oh, Mary!”
“Purpose”
It’s a strong season when five new plays (with options to spare) all deserve their nominations — and one of them, “Purpose,” won this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, while another, “English,” won in 2023. But though both, like the other nominees, are startling in some way, Cole Escola’s “Oh, Mary!,” in which Mary Todd Lincoln’s dreams of becoming a cabaret star are nearly foiled by her very Gaybraham husband, is almost freakishly so, barely containing its demented story in the very disciplined frame of a super-tight production. As good as the other nominees are, this comedy trumps them by ripping open the notion of what camp — and Broadway — can be.
Best Musical
“Buena Vista Social Club”
“Dead Outlaw”
✓ “Death Becomes Her”
★ “Maybe Happy Ending”
“Operation Mincemeat”
Despite its brand-extension birth, “Death Becomes Her” is a classic Broadway musical in at least this sense: It brings home the laughs. That’s no mean feat, but my vote usually goes to shows that advance Broadway instead of compromising with it. In their intimacy, their delicacy, their seriousness and faith in themselves, “Maybe Happy Ending” and “Dead Outlaw” both do that. For me, “Maybe Happy Ending,” by Will Aronson and Hue Park, has the slight edge because, on top of all that, it’s shattering (in the quietest way possible).
Best Play Revival
★ “Eureka Day”
“Romeo + Juliet”
“Our Town”
✓ “Yellow Face”
In this season’s death match between “Our Town,” the quintessential American drama, and “Romeo + Juliet,” the everlasting English tragedy, the Thornton Wilder revival won by a knockout. (Nobody really seemed to die in the Shakespeare.) But “Yellow Face,” by David Henry Hwang, complicating its story about colorblind casting with piquant ironies, will likely defeat them both. Still, I’d go for Jonathan Spector’s “Eureka Day,” a satire of vaccination politics that skewers both sides: anti-science know-nothings and trip-on-your-tongue progressives. It lets every kind of American cringe.
Best Musical Revival
★ “Floyd Collins”
“Gypsy”
“Pirates! The Penzance Musical”
✓ “Sunset Boulevard”
So sue me, I disliked “Sunset Boulevard,” which did everything in its considerable power to bury the property’s many shortcomings. That doesn’t seem to me to be a worthy goal in reviving a show. But you know what is? Getting to see our era’s biggest musical theater star (Audra McDonald) play one of the canon’s greatest roles (Rose in “Gypsy”). And though I’m loath to vote against a stage mother and a gaggle of strippers, for me, “Floyd Collins,” by Adam Guettel and Tina Landau, is the necessary revelation. It’s like “Our Town” in a cave: cosmic, brutal. (Since I worked with Guettel’s mother, Mary Rodgers, on her memoirs, I refrained from reviewing the show, but I do think it should win.)
Best Actor in a Play
George Clooney, “Good Night, and Good Luck”
✓ ★ Cole Escola, “Oh, Mary!”
Jon Michael Hill, “Purpose”
Daniel Dae Kim, “Yellow Face”
Harry Lennix, “Purpose”
Louis McCartney, “Stranger Things: The First Shadow”
Good as this category’s other actors are, I challenge any of them to get the laughs Escola gets from the hundreds of triple-axel lines in “Oh, Mary!” (“Why would I throw an entire woman down the stairs? Because it’s hilarious?”) And though Clooney would probably be fetching wearing a hoop skirt the size of a circus tent and flouncing a thousand corkscrew curls, no. Case closed.
Best Actress in a Play
★ Laura Donnelly, “The Hills of California”
Mia Farrow, “The Roommate”
LaTanya Richardson Jackson, “Purpose”
Sadie Sink, “John Proctor Is the Villain”
✓ Sarah Snook, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
What Snook does in “The Picture of Dorian Gray” is certainly worthy of some sort of prize. Perhaps from NASCAR? Because in playing all 26 roles in the Oscar Wilde adaptation, she switches gears and gets the pit-crew treatment on the fly while handling dangerous curves so fast they blur. But Donnelly, playing just two characters in “The Hills of California” — a hard-driving mother and, later, the daughter driven away — amazed me more. She was moving, not speeding.
Best Actor in a Musical
✓ Darren Criss, “Maybe Happy Ending”
Andrew Durand, “Dead Outlaw”
Tom Francis, “Sunset Boulevard”
★ Jonathan Groff, “Just in Time”
James Monroe Iglehart, “A Wonderful World: The Louis Armstrong Musical”
Jeremy Jordan, “Floyd Collins”
Criss, finding his inner robot, is terrific in “Maybe Happy Ending,” a story about future androids that, like humans of all eras, must face obsolescence and the loss of love it entails. I’d have voted for him — or Jordan, delivering the difficult “Floyd Collins” score as if it were his soul itself singing — had I not, in the last hot minutes of the Broadway season, seen Groff play Bobby Darin in “Just in Time.” The show itself is not as good as Criss’s or Jordan’s, but Groff flooded the zone (sometimes literally — he’s a shvitzer) in one of the best pure Broadway performances I’ve ever seen.
Best Actress in a Musical
Megan Hilty, “Death Becomes Her”
★ Audra McDonald, “Gypsy”
Jasmine Amy Rogers, “Boop! The Musical”
✓ Nicole Scherzinger, “Sunset Boulevard”
Jennifer Simard, “Death Becomes Her”
Having flogged it repeatedly, let me leave “Sunset Boulevard” alone, except to say that Scherzinger will likely win in this category for fulfilling the production’s impossible requirements. All of the other nominees went beyond that, especially Hilty and Simard as the twin undead frenemy tag-team of “Death Becomes Her.” I don’t want either of them to win, but I’d be glad if both of them somehow did. In any case, for me, it’s always McDonald. With 11 Tony nominations (a record) and six wins (likewise), she certainly doesn’t need any more nickel-plated medallions. She keeps earning them anyway.
Best Featured Actor in a Play
Glenn Davis, “Purpose”
★ Gabriel Ebert, “John Proctor Is the Villain”
Francis Jue, “Yellow Face”
Bob Odenkirk, “Glengarry Glen Ross”
✓ Conrad Ricamora, “Oh, Mary!”
Here comes that Gaybraham: a Civil War president who, in Ricamora’s sterling “Oh, Mary!” performance, is battling a civil war with himself. (It involves a closet and a hunky actor.) Also playing a semi-real character was Jue, beaming and then broken in “Yellow Face” as a Chinese American banker whose faith in his adopted country is betrayed. Even so, I lean toward Ebert, as everyone’s favorite high school English teacher — until maybe not so much. Giving a razor’s edge performance in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” he keeps you guessing until ultimately you’re forced to look back and consider your own complicity.
Best Featured Actress in a Play
★ Tala Ashe, “English”
Jessica Hecht, “Eureka Day”
Marjan Neshat, “English”
Fina Strazza, “John Proctor Is the Villain”
✓ Kara Young, “Purpose”
Given the extremely high level of ambient Broadway talent, the featured performer categories are always strong. No surprise, then, that all five of these nominees gave notably fine performances. It seems that Young, a nominee in the category in each of the past three seasons and a winner in 2024, will likely win again; she’s hilarious, yet with a spine of steel, in “Purpose.” Still, I’d love to see one of the “English” actors honored, especially Ashe. As an Iranian applying to medical school in Australia, she subtly communicated the fury of an intelligent person hitting the brick wall of a new language — and did so in a language anyone could understand.
Best Featured Actor in a Musical
Brooks Ashmanskas, “Smash”
Jeb Brown, “Dead Outlaw”
Danny Burstein, “Gypsy”
✓ Jak Malone, “Operation Mincemeat”
★ Taylor Trensch, “Floyd Collins”
Malone had the best moment and best song in “Operation Mincemeat” — an opportunity that won him a 2024 Olivier award for playing the role in London. He’ll probably match that honor here, and I’m not complaining. But I generally favor excellent performances in shows I liked better than in those I didn’t, and that’s what all four of the other nominees offer. In a tight race, I go for Trensch, perhaps because I feel seen: In “Floyd Collins,” he plays a thin-skinned yet possibly honorable journalist.
Best Featured Actress in a Musical
✓ ★ Natalie Venetia Belcon, “Buena Vista Social Club”
Julia Knitel, “Dead Outlaw”
Gracie Lawrence, “Just in Time”
Justina Machado, “Real Women Have Curves”
Joy Woods, “Gypsy”
When you cover seven characters, as Knitel does in “Dead Outlaw,” it’s easy to get overlooked. But like her castmates, some of whom cover as many as 13, she etches each perfectly, especially and unforgettably a teenage girl confiding her problems to a corpse. Still, I have to agree with the popular sentiment that Natalie Venetia Belcon should win for her turn as the Cuban singer Omara Portuondo in “Buena Vista Social Club.” Her hauteur, her profound voice and her sense of occasion floored me — the more so when, introducing the real Portuondo after the performance I saw, she dissolved in tears, giggles and fangirl hyperventilation. Great acting is a great disguise.
Best Director of a Play
Knud Adams, “English”
✓ Sam Mendes, “The Hills of California”
Sam Pinkleton, “Oh, Mary!”
★ Danya Taymor, “John Proctor Is the Villain”
Kip Williams, “The Picture of Dorian Gray”
To say “The Hills of California” was a typical Mendes staging is to say it met a very high standard. It helps, in swaying Tony voters, that anyone could see what he did: make what could be a confusing welter of eras and characters perfectly clear, while at the same time enhancing the mystery of the play. Adams’s achievement in “English,” on a miniature scale, was its equal, and Pinkleton’s, on a much more madcap one in “Oh, Mary!,” frankly astonishing. (Farce demands absolute precision.) Still, I’d lean toward Taymor: Engineering a long and almost imperceptible crescendo in “John Proctor Is the Villain,” she built from a comic base to an emotional climax that was the stunner of the season.
Best Director of a Musical
Saheem Ali, “Buena Vista Social Club”
★ Michael Arden, “Maybe Happy Ending”
David Cromer, “Dead Outlaw”
Christopher Gattelli, “Death Becomes Her”
✓ Jamie Lloyd, “Sunset Boulevard”
Much as I liked most (but not all!) of the shows these men (yes, all men) directed, it came down to Cromer, whose unimpeachable staging of “Dead Outlaw” feels like an unimpeachable Cromer staging, and Arden, who never does anything twice. (Highlights of his Broadway résumé: “Parade,” “Once on This Island,” the Deaf West “Spring Awakening.”) Layering emotions and imagery with equal artistry in “Maybe Happy Ending,” he turned a story that could easily have fallen into the murky pit of speculative fiction into a sparkling heartbreaker. That’s a sweet spot previously reached only by the most intrepid explorers of human regret and resilience — including Cromer.
Best Book of a Musical
Marco Ramirez, “Buena Vista Social Club”
✓ Itamar Moses, “Dead Outlaw”
Marco Pennette, “Death Becomes Her”
★ Will Aronson and Hue Park, “Maybe Happy Ending”
David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, “Operation Mincemeat”
Moses, whose play “The Ally” was a finalist for this year’s Pulitzer Prize for drama, will likely fare even better at the Tonys, with a win for “Dead Outlaw” to follow the one for “The Band’s Visit” in 2017. Fine by me; how he shaped the 30-year life of a dour misfit, and the 65-year afterlife of his corpse, into a droll, rollicking musical about death is a marvel. Still, see above: “Maybe Happy Ending,” more daring because more emotionally exposed, would reap my reward.
Best Score
★ David Yazbek and Erik Della Penna, “Dead Outlaw”
✓ Julia Mattison and Noel Carey, “Death Becomes Her”
Will Aronson and Hue Park, “Maybe Happy Ending”
David Cumming, Felix Hagan, Natasha Hodgson and Zoë Roberts, “Operation Mincemeat”
Joy Huerta and Benjamin Velez, “Real Women Have Curves”
I won’t be sorry at all if Mattison and Carey win for “Death Becomes Her”: They’re new blood on Broadway and their songs are full of comic delight — not easy to pull off at any level of experience. Aronson and Park, likewise newcomers, produced a score of such immense sensitivity and sophistication that it was basically tied in my mind with its polar opposite, the score for “Dead Outlaw.” I’m contradicting my own arguments above, but ultimately, it’s the rowdy existentialism of Yazbek’s and Della Penna’s barnburners that sticks strongest to my ears.
Best Choreography
Joshua Bergasse, “Smash”
Camille A. Brown, “Gypsy”
Christopher Gattelli, “Death Becomes Her”
✓ Jerry Mitchell, “Boop! The Musical”
★ Patricia Delgado and Justin Peck, “Buena Vista Social Club”
In its precision and pizazz, the second-act opener of “Boop!” — in which dancers flip between color and black-and-white as their kick line rotates — is trademark Mitchell. It’s also trademark Broadway, no small feat, but I was more enthralled this season by what felt less familiar. Working in idioms typically far from 42nd Street, Delgado and Peck bring ballet and Cuban social dancing into immediate, exuberant conversation. That conversation is a reminder, about “Buena Vista” and Broadway at its best, that liveness, in the body and in the moment, is the theater’s top honor.
Jesse Green is the chief theater critic for The Times. He writes reviews of Broadway, Off Broadway, Off Off Broadway, regional and sometimes international productions.
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